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To: Lonesome in Massachussets
And that made me think of PAVE PAWS. In the late Seventies the Air Force Magazine bragged about PAVE PAWS being constructed at four sites in the USA. Then around 1980 we never heard about it again for thirty years. The site in Georgia isn't even in Wikipedia.

The equipment including antenna cans were removed long ago, but here is a cool photo. It makes me wonder how they ever could have designed a phased array on an aircraft.

Notice the maintenance guy on the face of the antenna plane. Each one of those dots was a Campbell's soup can with four short dipoles in a cross pattern making a giant radar array. Pretty cool for old cold war technology.

39 posted on 12/24/2018 1:53:48 PM PST by higgmeister ( In the Shadow of The Big Chicken)
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To: higgmeister

PAVE PAWS Warner-Robbins was disassembled and moved to Clear ABF, near Fairbanks, and is now officially BMEWS (Ballistic Missile Early Warning System) Clear. It was mostly a direct reaction to North Korea.

PAVE PAWS was for detection of SLBM (Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles.) Problem at Warner-Robins was that when aircraft using the base runways intercepted the beam, the RF from the radar exceeded allowable exposure for EEO (electrically explosive ordinance). Luckily no one was ever ejected through the canopy. (Stray radiation does not care about sequencers. Ejection seat first, canopy first, all the same to stray RF.) They worked out a timing procedure where the radar would shut down during take offs and landings, but no one was every happy with that.


53 posted on 12/24/2018 5:31:19 PM PST by Lonesome in Massachussets (Schumer delenda est.)
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